


Perlustration

by what_alchemy



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-28
Updated: 2011-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-19 20:33:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/204922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Perlustration: The act of viewing all over. Jim makes sure not to take Spock for granted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perlustration

Sometimes, Jim catches Spock sleeping. It happens so rarely that Jim always, _always_ takes a moment just to see his lover as he is in repose: soft and lax, utterly without the tension or rigidity that so characterize the muscles of his body when he is awake. During ship’s night, Spock usually lets Jim fall asleep in his arms before extricating himself to work for a few more hours, and Jim wakes up alone because Spock gets up early to meditate. All of that is just fine — it’s how they negotiate being together and being in command of a starship at the same time. Even when the ship is sailing through friendly, empty space at some comfortable warp, her captain and first officer are busy men whose time is spent in keeping her running at peak performance, and it doesn’t leave a great deal of leisure time on their hands. Jim can’t get too sentimental about waking up entwined with his lover — at some point, when you realize you’re going to be together for what passes for forever, you get over feeling like everything is, or should be, romantic. You get over false idealizations and into reality — and reality involves a slim bunk, a lot of sharp joints in soft places, and really different resting needs, not to mention a comm device that could go off at any moment. Sometimes, reality means morning breath and bouts of gas and all sorts of undignified aspects of cohabitation that should probably faze him but don’t. Jim takes it all in stride.

But that doesn’t mean he wants to take any of it for granted, to take _Spock_ for granted. He knows he’s too damn lucky in this, and sometimes, in quiet moments, he has to stop and blink and realign himself to make sure the life he’s leading is his own, and he didn’t stumble into some other, better, _worthier_ Jim Kirk’s body in some freak beaming accident. So when he gets back to his quarters in the middle of beta shift after overseeing a questionable cargo loading from the planet the _Enterprise_ is orbiting and he sees Spock sprawled elegantly beneath the sheets of the bed they share, dead asleep, he just stands back to bask.

 _He must be exhausted_ , Jim thinks as he pauses by the edge of the bunk. The science department has him preoccupied with a few tricky bugs in their computer systems lately, and he hasn’t clocked more than two hours of sleep a night for the past several weeks. Even half-Vulcans with enough pride to choke an aristocrat can’t keep such a pace for so long. His uniform has gone down the laundry chute, and Jim doesn’t need to lift the bedding away to know that he’s got his underwear on. _In case of emergency_ , he’d told Jim when they first fit their bodies together to sleep — just sleep — in the same bed. So far there has been nothing so urgent that neither could spare the time to slap on some clothes when they’re called in the middle of the night, but Jim just chalks it up to a personal foible. He has his own, he’s sure.

Spock lies half on his side, one arm flopped over to where Jim would be if he occupied the bed while the other rests over his own chest. His breath comes deep and steady, a comforting timekeeping occasionally punctuated by a soft snore Jim finds either endearing or annoying, depending on his mood. Tonight, of course, he loves that soft little huff of thwarted breath.

Maybe it goes without saying, and maybe the entire _word_ is outdated, but Spock is truly otherworldly in his beauty. That trips Jim up sometimes. He has never forgotten that Spock is predominantly Vulcan, nor has he ignored it for his own convenience, but it would be wrong if Jim were to assert that he doesn’t still find it occasionally surprising how _inhuman_ Spock can look. It’s subtle — other than his eyebrows, his ears, and a whipcord slenderness that he’ll never shake, he looks basically human. Until you get up close, and you realize his skin is as dry and smooth as parchment, his hair thicker and coarser and somehow _heavier_ than any human hair Jim’s ever known, his muscles sleeker and less defined, bones rather bigger, denser, and closer to the surface of his skin. Until you note the green cast of that skin, not as sickly but as healthy, as beautiful.

Spock’s face as he sleeps is free of the furrow in his brow, of the tiny parenthesis of frown lines, of all his wakeful worries. When he sleeps, Jim imagines that he has achieved the peace he so strives for with his meditation and eternal exercises in control. Jim hesitates to cup a cheek — fuller than a full-Vulcan’s cheek would be — it would wake him. His hands itch to touch, but Jim clenches them to curb the urge. Instead he lets his gaze sweep over the bony prominence of Spock’s big nose, which so commands his face. Jim thinks noses are underrated in general, and all the odes to eyes get so tedious, so repetitious. If Jim were a poet, not of the dirty limericks he finds so clever, but of real poetry, he’d opine not about his lover’s brown sugar eyes but about the character of his nose, how it rises and peaks, how it leads Spock into the universe and takes Jim, helpless but to follow, along for the ride. Spock’s nose, Jim thinks, deserves a kiss.

Jim shimmies out of his uniform and doesn’t bother to cross the room to chuck it down the chute, leaving swaths of black and gold in a puddle on the deck. He eases into the bed as smoothly as he’s capable, but Spock shifts anyway, eyelids fluttering. Jim leans in to give that nose a kiss — on the bridge, on the cold tip. Spock sighs, but doesn’t open his eyes. Jim knows he’s awake though, and he can contain himself no longer; he presses his hand to Spock’s angular jaw, runs his thumb over the proud sweep of a high cheekbone. Kisses that too.

“Jim,” Spock murmurs, voice deep and rough.

“Hi,” Jim whispers back. He presses gentle kisses into Spock’s curiously blue eyelids, into the bony orbit. Still half-asleep, Spock lets himself smile, just a little, and without self-consciousness. Jim’s heart swells, and he kisses the corner of that curved pink mouth.

Spock shifts to throw a leg over Jim’s and lock his arms around his middle, pulling him close with another sigh. Jim breathes in the warm spice smell of him and pushes his face into the hollow of Spock’s throat. He lays a kiss there too, and along the notch of his collarbones. His fingertips follow the strong broad sweep of them to his shoulder, and he squeezes then at Spock’s bicep. He rests his head against Spock’s chest, tufts of ordered black hair soft on the skin of his face. He settles in close.

“Love all of you,” he says, “lumpy toes to that cowlick you swear you don’t have right on your crown.”

“Vulcans do not have cowlicks,” Spock rumbles into Jim’s hair. But he squeezes Jim just that much tighter, and when Jim falls asleep, Spock lets himself follow.


End file.
